I read this thread in its entirety over the course of about an hour. Once I’d finished, I drank several glasses of wine in quick succession and typed in the comment box that Pluto was no longer a planet. fURTHERMORE, I added, unaware I had clicked on all caps, IF YOU PEOPLE DON’T WANT YOUR HUSBANDS THEN WHY DO YOU GO TO THE TROUBLE OF MAKING THEM UP IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Directly after posting this, I closed my laptop and dialed the number I had for the Centre. The call went straight to voicemail, so I left a message I now remember very little about.
* * *
I dreamed a lot during that time and in uneasy colors—pale water leaking from the cupboard, the notches from an unfamiliar spine strewn cold across the windowsill. One night, I dreamed a congregation: fifty women in formal hats declaring themselves the acolytes of the Church of the Blessed Sacrament of Our Wives Under the Sea. The church was tall, a plunging upward streak of ceiling that leered into the distant vaulted rafters, then fell beneath our feet to corresponding depths. I sat with legs curled up inside a pew and peered into the vast abyss that should have been the floor, the chancel, aisle, and transepts. The space beneath us seethed with almost-movement—dark surge of something otherworldly. The woman who had once asked me about Flat Stanley stood up toward the altar, arms out, her hair flowing oddly upward. The convocation raised their hands in imitation and I looked toward the front, expecting a song, a benediction, a prayer for those long lost. The USS Johnston, said the woman at the altar, is the deepest shipwreck thus far located, at over twenty thousand feet. The known wreckage pieces consist of two turrets, a propeller shaft and propeller, two funnels, a mast, and several unidentified pieces of debris. At the point of sinking, only 141 of the vessel’s 327-strong crew were saved. At least 90 managed to disembark the vessel before she sank, but were never seen again. There was a murmur in the congregation, a sound that I was slow to recognize as Amen.
* * *
In the fifth month, I began to assume she was dead, which made things both easier and harder. I felt nothing and then utterly kneecapped by it, wanted so desperately to know what her last thought had been and whether it had been about me. I called Sam crying but when pressed at first could only say that the cat I’d been looking after had died. Oh sweetheart, she said—the warm midnight weight of her voice, distant rustle of duvet covers—you know my mother used to tell me that cats know when it’s time to go. We had one when I was little and one day when she was about sixteen we couldn’t find her anywhere, assumed she’d run off. Anyway two days later we found her, all curled up in a box of picnic rugs in the shed at the bottom of the garden. She just knew it was time to take herself off, you know?
In response to this, I kept on crying and told her I’d made it up, that I didn’t know why I’d said that thing about the cat.
I know that, sweetheart, she said to me, I had a feeling. Her voice was thick but she kept talking and I think I loved her for that.
LEAH
I’ll tell you something: for someone who likes the water, I’ve never been particularly keen on the dark.
We sat together and stared at the torches, at the thin central reeds of the filaments, which left white lines across the backs of my eyes.
“We submerged at noon,” Jelka said at one point, gesturing to her wrist, “but my watch is broken. It’s stopped on two forty-five.”
It was tricky to tell much in this regard by any normal method; none of us were very hungry or very thirsty or showing much of an impulse to sleep. I had no watch and neither did Matteo, and without power, all the dials and meters and timepieces ranged around the main console were less than useless.
“Could have been days,” Matteo said and then shook his head in the manner of someone trying to get water out of their ears, “but that’s not really a helpful thing to say, is it?”
“Is it strange,” I asked, “that we haven’t seen anything yet?” They looked at me and I gestured my head toward the window without moving my eyes from the lights. “However long we’ve been here, I mean, and we haven’t seen a thing.”
Matteo laughed, the sound metallic against the ceiling of the craft.
“Well, I don’t know what you expect to see, buddy, just staring at that torch for hours.”
I nodded, shrugged.
“That’s fair enough, I guess, but you haven’t seen anything either.”
Deep-sea fish are not fish in a way that the average person would recognize. Having evolved to deal with the dark and the pressure, they sprout feelers from unfamiliar places, grow great gulping jaws that overspill the circumference of their bodies, produce their own creeping chemical light. Instead of relying on gas for buoyancy, many deep-sea species simply roll through the water like jelly, unencumbered by an inner or outer skeleton, their bodies made up of compounds of such low density that the pressure of surrounding water poses no threat at all. Some of my favorite deep-sea fish are also some of the strangest-looking: the frilled shark, generally considered a living fossil, with its thirty-odd rows of needlelike teeth; the faceless cusk, which appears to have almost no features at all beyond two pairs of nostrils and a large and bulbous snout. Many deep-sea creatures also have a tendency to gigantism, though this is not a topic on which, so far, there has been a great deal of study. Suffice it to say, there has been a noted tendency in crustaceans and cephalopods retrieved from the deep ocean to be of far greater than usual size, though suggested explanations for this range from lower temperatures to food scarcity and are not generally agreed upon.